Man, I had fogotten some of these hacks ( bad memories ). Brian's right - it was a bad idea! It was all left over because the original ISO/OSI stack did not (originally) have a internet-work layer and assumed a flat world. I remembered that argument!! On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 2:49 PM, Ian McLaughlin <ian at platinum.net> wrote: Sounds like bang-path routing from the good-old-days of UUCP. Yup but the OpenSite::ClosedSite only needed one level of indirection, IIRC. In practice as people noted, for things like email and notes you did not care. Again, once the internal network became more IP based, many of the hacks went away - at least for many of the users that lived in pure IP land (like me). By the time of the "Compaq-tion" an engineer only needed to use VMS for things like some of the payroll and benefits stuff. So like I am with Windows today @ Intel, I was with VMS @ DEC => I could use it and did, but tried to avoid it like many other painful things. Clem